America’s Most Outrageous Teacher Cheating Scandals

Many states still fail to follow up on evidence of teacher cheating. Here’s our rundown of the long history of such cheating.

Update: This story has been updated to reflect recent developments in the Atlanta cheating scandal. It has also been corrected.

Scandals involving cheating by teachers and schools to pump up ever-more-important student test scores swept the country in 2011, with states failing to implement simple and effective checks. But they've also been happening for years, and oversight is only beginning to catch up.

Here's an overview of some of the most shocking instances of teacher cheating, plus a few episodes that may have been overblown.

This phenomenon was christened the "Lake Wobegon Effect," after Garrison Keillor's legendary town where "every child is above average." Cannell's reports argued that score inflation resulted from infrequent test updates and too much "teaching to the test," as well as outright teacher cheating. While his findings were hotly debated, a Department of Education-sponsored study confirmed most of them.

Birmingham, Ala.: School Targeted Students to Withdraw Before Tests (2004)

When the director of a GED program in Birmingham noticed in 2001 that many students were showing up at his office weeks after they had "withdrawn" from a local high school because of "lack of interest," he decided to investigate. With the help of a school board member, he found that more than 500 students—about 5 percent of the high school student body—had been asked to leave their schools, the New York Times reported in 2004. These forced withdrawals happened before students were to take an important standardized test but after the school was evaluated for the funding it would receive based on enrollment. The school district denied that the withdrawals had anything to do with getting rid of students who might have dragged down the school's test scores.

When the Dallas Morning News analyzed test results across Texas, it found hundreds of schools with test scores that had jumped and dropped in suspicious ways. The newspaper identified low-income schools with students at one grade level who struggled with basic skills—and students in the next grade who received nearly perfect scores or outperformed the state's most elite districts.

Atlanta: Teachers Changed Answers in a District 'Run Like the Mob' (2011)

Teachers in Atlanta were so used to changing students' answers on standardized tests that they gathered for "erasure" parties and prepared answer keys on plastic transparencies to make the cheating easier. One teacher told investigators that she feared retaliation if she didn't participate, saying the district was "run like the mob." At least 178 teachers and principals — including ex-schools chief Beverly L. Hall — have been implicated in the scandal, which was first brought to light by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Hall was indicted March 29, 2013, on conspiracy and related charges.

There's still no conclusive evidence of cheating at a Washington, D.C., school that gained federal accolades—and monetary bonuses—for its high performance on tests. But a USA Today investigation found that student test sheets had unusually high numbers of wrong answers that had been erased and replaced with right ones. Testing experts said the odds that these erasures occurred purely by chance were smaller than the odds of winning the Powerball grand prize in the lottery. (District officials say teachers trained students in testing techniques that may have led to more erasures.) The school's former "poster boy" principal recently resigned from his position as a superintendent. Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of D.C. schools who touted the school's success, has resisted answering questions.

Correction: April 4, 2013: A previous version of this post incorrectly suggested that in Birmingham, more than 500 students had “withdrawn” because of “lack of interest” from a single local high school, rather than from high schools across the district.

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